Folk Tales
by Selah Ex Animo
Summary: Link keeps a memento of the king he killed. Ganlink.


The books in Link's house come from every place — from thrift stalls in Castle Town, selling for rupee shards and pulpy with water-damage; from friends, the pages well-thumbed, characters blurred by stains; from a stranger's bookshelf, table, or floor, most often when the house is abandoned, and sometimes when it is not, spines and covers calling out to him, greasy with dust and smelling sharp and strange, of salt and neglect and forgotten love.

He has read some of them more than once. A few, not at all. There are one or two he only wishes to look at, humbled by their weight, their provenance. There are several — and one in particular — he cannot get enough of. Most of the books bear the mark of his education, slow and haphazard — notes scrawled in charcoal, underlines, characters circled. Most bear the mark of his travels — sand dribbling from creases, grass staining a cover, water buckling a spine. A clump of pages stained orange by pumpkin soup — glued together with chu jelly — browned with blood.

There are the books the princess gave him, that he tends like an altar. Thick histories, several philosophic treatises, books of astronomy and music, a volume of poems. He loves this last, because her favorite poems bear the impress of her fingers, her rosewater scent. He has memorized them, not simply because of the affection he bears for her, not simply to see guileless delight of her smile when he sings them to her, _sotto voce_, his voice a prayer meant for her alone — but because these poems, and one book, are the only things left of the Gerudo king — this man they have killed.

Zelda keeps the poetry, and Link keeps the book — a slender volume of Gerudo folktales he has read so many times that the binding has loosened, and the pages, soft with wear, are falling out. He crafts a leather pouch to keep the book safe, but he is hungry for it, always so hungry. He cannot let it stay there longer than a night.

He does not know how many times he has read of the clever queen who lost her throne to a wicked sister and disguised herself as a carnival sword-swallower to win it back — of the handmaiden cursed to become a boar and bear the wizard who enscorcelled her, until a cousin cut off his head — of the soldier who led her sisters in a battle against a Bulblin king and his legion. There is a tale of creation, how the Gerudo and Hylians were one people until Farore lost a bet and was forced to scatter them — a tale of Gerudo Mesa and the demon who built it, only to be tricked out of the soul he was promised by a canny grandmother. Link cannot chose a favorite — they all live inside of him, these stories, on the backs of his eyelids and the hollows of his tongue, how a priestess found gold in a moldorm's cavern, how a girl woke a prince slumbering in the sand, how a witch stole a Zora skin and used it for magic.

It is only in this part of his life — with this one book — that he is greedy, rapacious, that he devours without qualm. But there is always something left between the bent, yellowed pages, among the sun-blanched characters, meanings and nuances that flourish the more he pursues them, a feast meant for gluttony.

It was the Gerudo king who first showed him this, the way stories unfolded and kept unfolding.

Link has shown the book to the princess, tried, once, to read to her from it. But she asked him to stop, asked him to leave, covered her face. He takes this to mean that there are stories, too, between her and the Gerudo king, things she cannot bear to remember, memories that these folktales rouse, raw and living and terrible. He does not know why the stories do this to her, and not the poems.

But he supposes that in a way, it is the same for him. The poems lift his heart, and the folktales sink it — but it is the folktales he cannot get enough of and wolfs down until he is sick. These are tales the Gerudo king once whispered to him in the dark, words he shaped down Link's spine and against his lips. Link falls asleep over the book, thinking of the tales inked into the king's skin — spells so powerful Link felt their sting in Ganondorf's sweat. Link thinks of his own hands burrowed in the mass of the king's richly red hair, finding tales of sororal love wrought into jade combs, silver pins, the coconut scent of oil.

It is the tales that will kill him, these tales Ganondorf taught him to love, these tales that are the only thing left.

What tales, he wonders, were written into the steel that entered Ganondorf's heart? What tales bled out, and turned to charcoal beneath the sun? What tales did he silence with one stab of his blade?

He looks for them, among the folktales. Looks for them among the queens and goblins and canny grandmothers, the yellow pages falling out and rustling across the floor.

Looks, never quite knowing what they will look like if he finds them.


End file.
